It's easy to attack to Christopher Hitchens now he's not around to defend himself

When Evelyn Waugh died, his enemies all came out of the woodwork to write spiteful pieces, or so his son Auberon thought. The point was that these critics were too cowardly to dare attack the fearsome novelist while he was alive, so they pounced when his corpse was hardly cold.

Members of the Christopher Hitchens fan club may feel that Michael Wolff has done the same thing with the revisionist critique that he has written for GQ magazine. But that would be unfair.

Wolff, who worked with Hitchens at Vanity Fair, has actually done a very impressive job of unpicking the writings, intellectual achievements generally, and personality. He puts his finger on what was so alluring about the Hitchens mystique, especially to young and would-be journalists:

As the existential crisis of journalism became more severe, Hitchens became an increasingly salutary and reassuring figure. In spite of it all, he continued and thrived…
He became a model for the large numbers of young people who wanted into the game (confusingly, as the business shrank, more people sought to be in it). Not only did his example suggest that there could still be a livelihood living by one's pen, he showed that there could still be great romance to it – and damn the internet.

Wolff's comments about Hitchens as a person also have the ring of authenticity:

I always found him perplexingly impersonal. There was the wall of all that verbiage. Off the page and in person… blah blah blah… and always repeating his own columns. I never had any sense of whether he was happy or despairing. Lonely or content. Satisfied or self loathing. But certainly being drunk so much of the time would not suggest he was tiptop.

Anyone who saw Hitchens in real life, perhaps at one of the public speaking events at which he flourished, will know what Wolff means about the writer's "external" life. After the God is Great book and his transformation into professional atheist, Hitchens turned into a combination of revivalist preacher and pop star. Wolff describes him falling out of limousines and always, drunkenly, taking on lesser opponents. When I was in my twenties, I loved his early collections of essays and "minority reports", but went off him once he'd become a massive celebrity: he no longer seemed so cool. (Perhaps it was just that I'd got older, too.)

Wolff is not immune to the overwhelming appeal of Hitchens, which was particularly to other male writers. He had abundant charisma, and seemed most alive when projecting this in performance. As Wolff says, "His greatest effort always seemed to be to live in public, with the effort itself being more important than the nature of the opinions or controversy that got him there." In his writing and in his life he lived as he wanted – or seemed to – without fear of the consequences. Most of us would like to live like that, and that's why we find Hitchens so appealing.

Nor is it easy to disagree with Wolff's assessment of the books, nearly all of which are collections of shorter works, written at high speed. Hitchens may have been a brilliant writer, with a dazzling facility with the language and an impressive range of reference, but he was not really an "intellectual", did not produce a long book of real substance, and many of his views are a bit suspect. All of which is, of course, easy to say now that the brilliant debater is no longer here to respond.